Gender is all too relevant in violence statistics

Your correspondents call on the director of public prosecutions to “affirm [her] commitment to eliminating intimate violence against human beings of any gender” and criticise the Crown Prosecution Service’s presentation of statistics in its annual violence against women and girls report for being so explicitly gendered (Letters, 2 July).

It is established fact that these crimes are massively disproportionately committed against women and girls (female genital mutilation exclusively so) and that they are related to women’s broader inequality with men. Your correspondents claim without citation that “one in six of all victims” are male. This is disputed, and certainly does not apply equally to all the forms of abuse in the CPS report. Eminent sociologist Professor Sylvia Walby was recently reported in this newspaper calling for an overhaul of the current methods of recording violent crime which are leading to gross understatement of the proportion directed at women (Report, 10 June).

Furthermore, it is also critical that we retain gender in our naming and analysis of these crimes because of the gender of the perpetrators, whom your correspondents do not mention at all. Many male victims of domestic violence, and the vast majority of men and boys who suffer sexual violence, are abused by men. We need to understand who these men are, why they choose to do what they do, how they target their victims by preying on other inequalities including age, sexuality and social class, and the gendered excuses for violence and abuse, if we are ever to eradicate it.

Over the last few years the CPS has brought together its reporting on the prosecution of crimes of violence against women and girls in recognition that there is a serious justice deficit in relation to them. This contributes to impunity and ultimately perpetrators’ confidence that they will get away with their crimes (as shown powerfully in the Rotherham child sexual exploitation inquiry report). The CPS report enables us to hold the prosecution service to account for the efforts it then makes to improve these justice outcomes.

The UK’s lack of “a consistent and coherent approach to tackling violence against women” was criticised in an official report on the UK by UN special rapporteur Rashida Manjoo recently who also raised a concern about a shift from gender specificity to gender neutrality.

In searching for recognition and then for justice and support for male survivors of abuse, it is a grave mistake to suggest taking gender out of the naming and analysis, and neutralising these crimes into Orwellian “intimate abuse”. A failure to name and call out the abuse of power in these crimes is what kept them invisible for so long.

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Southall Black Sisters, a not-for-profit, secular and inclusive organisation, was established in 1979 to meet the needs of Black (Asian and African-Caribbean) women. Our aims are to highlight and challenge all forms gender-related violence against women, empower them to gain more control over their lives; live without fear of violence and assert their human rights to justice, equality and freedom.